This story is part of our occasional series The Power of Moms: Stories of Intergenerational Influence and Climate Legacy. Read our first Power of Moms story here.
Sitting on more than 40 square acres of land in northeastern Oklahoma are huge piles of mineral sediment known as chat, remnants of the region’s past mining of zinc, cadmium, lead, and other toxic metals. For decades, these chat piles have contaminated the water, the land, and the air in this region, creating the Tar Creek Superfund site, one of the most environmentally contaminated areas in the United States.
But dark skies filled with sediment and a rust-colored stream sickening residents are a far cry from the images that are presented in the documentary short film “Meet Me at the Creek,” directed by Loren Waters. The film profiles Rebecca Jim, a local environmental activist who has been advocating to clean up the region since the 1980s. The film spurred a relationship between Waters, 28, and Jim, 74, where they each filled a missing link in their family histories. For Waters, whose Cherokee grandparents are deceased, Jim has become an elder grandmother figure and cultural connector. “Rebecca and I are both Cherokee, so we have a lot of similar values and background that we share.” On a recent Zoom call, Jim, who has an adult son but no grandchildren of her own, says wistfully that she is “very happy to have Loren … more than she knows,” as a would-be granddaughter.
Forging a relationship rooted in tradition
Waters first met Jim in 2021 through a professor at the University of Oklahoma and began attending Jim’s “toxic tours” of the Tar Creek site. The film attempts to show a different future for the region with images like a baby’s toes gently touching the clear water and a young couple wading knee-deep, smiling, a vibrant blue sky overhead.
Those scenes were not shot at Tar Creek, but at a neighboring creek that isn’t polluted. For Waters, showing this alternate reality is critical to inspiring the Cherokee community of what could be. If the creek were cleaned, “we could forage for our traditional foods, we could forage honeysuckle for our baskets that we weave, we could take our babies to the water,” says Waters.
In the off hours of filming the documentary, the relationship between the two women deepened. “There would be days where I would come to her house after work, and she would take me and drive me all along her land and show me all of the plants that grow there,” Waters says. Jim lives on a few acres of land that were passed down to her from her father. Her house, which she built with her father, is surrounded by flowers, shrubs, and grass. It’s Jim’s connection to the land and the passing down of Tribal knowledge that most inspired the young Waters. “Things like what time of year the black walnuts fall from the trees and how long they need to sit on the ground to rot in order for you to be able to use them, or different fruits that grow and if you can eat them or not,” Waters says. And it’s more than knowing which plants to stay away from. “We’re in this place that she built with her own hands. And it makes me appreciate it so much more.”
Children were suffering, so moms took action
In 1979, Jim got a job as a counselor at a local Indian public school, and after a few years, she began to notice a decline in her students’ cognitive and behavioral abilities. “They were struggling. And they cried in my office, because they couldn’t work. They couldn’t learn. They couldn’t make 100 on a paper. They couldn’t keep up. They couldn’t keep their locker straight. They couldn’t do lots of normal things that you would have people that age do,” Jim says in an interview. When the water in the creek turned the color of rust and the fish started dying, Jim made the connection that the creek was making people in the community sick. “Our kids were poisoned, not only by the creek, but also by all the toxins in the air from the pollution, just northwest, and in the very homes they lived in.”
In addition to the water itself poisoning the community, a 2020 study published by the National Institute of Health found that airborne lead particles near the chat piles were 2 to 5 times higher than in Tulsa, which is more than an hour from Tar Creek. Researchers also found that airborne lead particles contributed up to 10% of the lead sediment found in lakes surrounding the site. According to the report, “local residents described that on windy days, the fine dust swirls high into the air.”
Before the community was aware of the dangers of chat, Jim says, kids would play in the toxic piles and people would use the sediment in the foundations of their houses. Soon a coalition of mothers who were also seeing the developmental changes in their children and the changing color of the creek water came together. Today, Jim is the executive director and Tar Creekkeeper at the LEAD Agency, which was built on that coalition of moms and is dedicated to cleaning up the toxic site.
“Before there was a LEAD Agency, there were the moms,” Jim says. “So many of them met with me at the city library, and we went through the Tar Creek documents trying to see what was happening to us. And it was really, that bunch, that core bunch of moms that helped us organize, helped us fill out our 501(c)(3) IRS papers.”
“We’re growing older together”
Dustin Davidson, Restoration and Revitalization Section Manager at the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, says cleanup efforts, which began in 1985, have included cleaning water drains and residential yards and removing chat piles. The organization’s website also offers contact information for child blood lead testing, yard contamination testing, chat use restrictions, and fish consumption guidelines. “Before the cleanup started, they looked like mountains,” says Davidson of the chat piles. “We’re just chipping away at it.”
Today, Jim is still fighting to clean up Tar Creek, but she hasn’t forgotten the many children she helped as a counselor who suffered the devastating consequences of chat poisoning. Jim says she still writes letters to two former students who are incarcerated and stays in touch with another who has regular dialysis treatments. “The kids that I worked with are growing older, and we’re growing older together,” says Jim.
For Waters, one of the biggest lessons she’s learned from working with Jim is how to be present, something that in today’s world can feel almost impossible for a generation that is always connected to information like Gen Z is. “A lot of us aren’t present, and we get so disconnected from what really matters and what surrounds us,” says Waters. Learning how to connect her work to the impact that it has on the community is a profound teaching for Waters. “Rebecca really brought me back and reminded me, like, this is why we’re doing the work. This is the connection that I believe we all should have to the place that we’re from, and we can’t really get that knowledge anywhere else,” Waters says. “It’s from the people that we’re connected with. And for me that was through Rebecca.”
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